About the Book

There is more to sound recording than just recording sound. Far from being simply a tool for the preservation of music, the technology is a catalyst. In this award-winning text, Mark Katz provides a wide-ranging, deeply informative, consistently entertaining history of recording's profound impact on the musical life of the past century, from Edison to the Internet. Fully revised and updated, this new edition adds coverage of mashups and Auto-Tune, explores recent developments in file-sharing, and includes an expanded conclusion and bibliography.

Find illustrative sound and film clips on the new companion website at www.ucpress.edu/go/capturingsound

About the Author

Mark Katz is Associate Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and the author of the forthcoming Groove Music.

Reviews

“Mark Katz’s Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music is a timely read. As the Supreme Court tackles issues relating to downloading music and file-sharing, Katz . . . examines how recording technology has influenced the ways we make and listen to music. Katz’s discussion of the topic is far-ranging and illuminating. . . . As Katz progresses from the development of the phonograph to turntablism and digital sampling, giving examples along the way, attentive readers will likely want to hear some of the pieces cited. Well, there’s no need to visit iTunes because the book comes with a CD of recordings. The disc makes Capturing Sound a good read and a good listen.”—John Lewis Baltimore Mag

“Katz’s Capturing Sound represents an emerging musicology that is equally at home with the popular and the classical. . . . The book concisely covers an astonishing range of topics linked to the rise of recording technology over the last century. . . . Katz’s approach is primarily historical, drawing on an impressive array of documentation from recording archives, advertising, and literary sources.”—Joseph Auner Institute For Studies In American Music

“Capturing Sound is an interesting, insightful, and informative journey into the origins of recording technology.”—Marian S. Schultz Music Educators Journal

“Of a number of recent books on the history of recording. . . .Katz’s book is the most approachable. . . . In lucid, evenhanded prose, it ranges all over the map, from classical to hip-hop.”—Alex Ross New Yorker

“A creative and highly original examination of the countless ways in which recordings . . . have transformed our understanding of what we listen to and for. Katz is at home in every musical genre.”—Tim Page Washington Post Book World

"In Capturing Sound, Mark Katz focuses on the overwhelming technological transformation that changed music from a medium of elite and canonical performances to a mass-consumed fashion-object experienced privately. Underneath the wealth of scholarship and insight about how new recording techniques continue to change our experience of music, Katz wonders how we ourselves have been changed by the successive recording technologies that emerged since Edison. This is a one-of-a-kind book. It will change your mind about why and how we listen to music."—Giles Slade, author of Made To Break

"I only wish I had put as much thought into making records as Mark Katz does in appreciating and analyzing them. I've always said that what I do is not rocket science, but critques like this make it sound like it has a place in modern culture."—Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim, composer, producer, DJ